I posted to a poetry group I follow on Facebook (which I would link to but you need to be logged into facebook to see, which sort of defeats the purpose) about Leonard Richardson's Olipy library, seeing as there are several people in the group who enjoy work from generated text.

The resulting discussion turned to Matt Butler's project, Open Wound, and the potential for getting it to run locally using something like XAMPP, since the site's version of it is broken.

Anyway. To cut a long story really short, this is how you do it on Windows:

Download and install Strawberry Perl. Where you install it isn't super important, but you'll need to remember it later. I just installed it to the default, c:\strawberry.

From the start menu, select Strawberry Perl > Tools > CPAN Client.

A Command-line window will appear. Enter the following command:

install Lingua::EN::Tagger

It'll need to install a bunch of dependencies from a server, so give it some time. With any luck, it won't shout any errors at you. Eventually, it'll dump you back at the command prompt - type "bye" to quit.

Next, download Wampserver and install it using default everything. The version I used was this one - 2.4, 32bit, PHP 5.4 - but I doubt it matters. At the end of the installation when it asks you if you want to run it, uncheck the box.

Go to c:\wamp (assuming that's where you installed it) and create a new folder called cgi-bin. Go to this new folder and drop the index.pl from your Open Wound download.

Open index.pl up in Notepad and change the first line from

#!/usr/bin/perl

to

#!"\strawberry\perl\bin\perl.exe"

(assuming you installed perl to c:\strawberry).

Save the file.

Go to the start menu and run Wampserver. Check for the system tray icon (it should be a little green W).

Visit http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/index.pl

When you're done, remember to close to close wamp from the system tray menu (left-click it and select "Stop All Services" and/or right-click and select "exit").